Is there an audience that would benefit especially from this session?
This is a really interesting question! Although the title of the session says 'Involuntary DBA', that really means anyone who needs to know how to keep SQL Server running well - through configuration, maintenance, operations. We've had senior DBAs love this workshop for giving them a refresher on everything they should be considering too.

After having attended your seminar, what are two or three things that an attendee will be able to take back to the office and put to use right away?
Everything's going to be applicable straight away, but some of the most important things will be understanding how to configure database files (log and data), how to cope with index fragmentation, and why configuration changes make SQL Server behave one way or another.

What background should attendees ideally have to be fully prepared for your seminar?
Students should have some familiarity with SQL Server concepts (like what a backup or a transaction or an index is) and have used Management Studio.

What experience are you, as a speaker, bringing to this session?
Kimberly and I have more than 30 years combined experience working with SQL Server - from writing the actual SQL Server code itself to writing and delivering the top Microsoft Certified Master - SQL Server qualification training - plus training all levels from beginner to expert. We spend our entire year teaching, writing about, and consulting on SQL Server - it's our life! You can read some student comments from our workshops at Student comments from our class last week.

Is there an audience that would benefit especially from this session?
Understanding how SQL Server manages concurrent user access is crucial to database developers and DBAs. For a developer, failing to design an application with concurrency in mind, and failure to test an application with the maximum number of expected simultaneous users is one of the main causes of poor application performance. For a DBA, excessive blocking can be a major cause of poor overall system performance will a DBA may be called on to troubleshoot and "fix". Anyone who works with SQL Server and wants to get the most of the system and the applications will find value in understanding how SQL Server manages concurrency, how to troubleshoot concurrency problems, and how to alleviate the pain.

After having attended your seminar, what are two or three things that an attendee will be able to take back to the office and put to use right away?

Through understanding of why concurrency management is a crucial part of database and application tuning

Solid familiarity with the details of both concurrency models: how SQL Server implements pessimistic concurrency with locking, how locking causes blocking, and when /why optimistic concurrency can be a useful alternative

Knowledge of the available tools for monitoring and troubleshooting concurrency problems: the metadata views and the Management Data Warehouse

What background should attendees ideally have to be fully prepared for your seminar?
This seminar does not require an expert background in SQL Server, but rather some experience with SQL Server Management Studio and TSQL queries, and an understanding of basic transactional work processing. The most important prerequisite is a desire to learn more about the way SQL Server works internally and how you can take advantage of the inner working to create the best performing system and applications possible.

What experience are you, as a speaker, bringing to this session?
I have been working with SQL Server for 23 years, as a technical support engineer, writer, trainer, curriculum developer and performance consultant. I have watched the product grow from the first true client /server database system running on small departmental systems to the World Class data processing system it is today in SQL Server 2008.

I have always thought that I enjoyed Summer the most. The sunshine, trips to the beach, lobsters stuffed with bacon, and long bike rides. But as I get older (and supposedly wiser) I am coming to realize that Fall may be the most enjoyable season. Perfect temperatures, things are still green, plenty of sunshine, football starts, the kids go back to school and of course the 24 Hours of PASS Summit Preview. What’s not to love about all of that?

We’ve done three 24 Hours of PASS events in the past thirteen months. While some may point to the great content as the number one takeaway that they get from the events, I would point to something else entirely.

Energy.

Every time I attend a PASS Summit I come away energized. Even if I have been awake for 80 hours or more, when the PASS Summit is over I always feel energized. I feel as if I can take on any project or problem because I know that if I run into any roadblocks then I can quickly reconnect with my peers and ask for help.

And I get the same feeling after interacting with the community during the 24 Hours of PASS. Not only do I get the great content from 24 sessions (or 28, as was the case this time), but I get the opportunity to connect with people in each of those sessions. And those connections grow over time, I get to meet people in real life at the PASS Summit or a PASS SQL Saturday, we talk more and we find ways to help each other.

For me, that is what PASS is all about, the ability to help database professional get connected with one another. And I love being able to help make that happen.
See you at the Summit.

We’ll try to push this out through multiple channels, we’re trying to forecast dates to give those thinking about events (but not yet committed) visibility into which areas/dates are already committed. We won’t set up the event until you submit the formal event request, this is only to reserve the date. We’re also using this to try to make sure we have sponsor funds available for as many events as possible through the end of the PASS fiscal year (June 30, 2011). Send a note to Sanj at PASS HQ, or just post a comment here and I’ll follow up with you.

The ballots are in, the votes are counted, and the results have been confirmed. While PASS was lucky to have 9 fantastic nominees for this year's elections race, congratulations are in order for this year's three winning candidates.

Andy Warren, President of Fourdeuce Inc., and Douglas McDowell, CEO (North America) of Solid Quality Mentors, were re-elected to the Board. They will be joined for the 2011/2012 Board of Directors term by Allen Kinsel, last year's joint PASSion Award Winner.

This year there were 1084 ballots cast, a 188% improvement on the 576 ballots cast in the 2009 elections. 2796 unique votes were counted.

Detailed results:

Candidate

Votes

Andy Warren

789

Douglas McDowell

604

Allen Kinsel

511

Geoff Hiten

464

Mark Ginnebaugh

428

For biographies of all the candidates in the 2010 elections race, please visit our Elections website.

Not that long ago (only two weeks), we asked speakers to submit abstracts for the Chalk Talk Theater. We've finalized the selections and I'd like to tell you about the process that we used and introduce the speakers who will be in the Chalk Talk Theater this year.

First, how did we go about getting the abstracts? We put out a call for speakers. We collected your entries. Once the call for speakers closed, we collected your submissions in a spreadsheet, read over them independently, and then compared our lists. There wasn't any specific criteria that we used, just finding abstracts that encouraged discussion.

Here are the abstracts that were selected:

Chuck Heinzelman Speaking at PASS - How to Write an Abstract.

Meredith Ryan-Smith Energizing the Next Generation: Encouraging and Inspiring Young Women to Choose Tech Careers

Is there an audience that would benefit especially from this session?
T-SQL developers and DBAs. Anyone who needs to write or review queries and is looking for ways to improve existing solutions.

After having attended your seminar, what are two or three things that an attendee will be able to take back to the office and put to use right away?

Simplify existing solutions.

Optimize existing solutions.

Understand better the ingenious windowing concept in SQL.

What background should attendees ideally have to be fully prepared for your seminar?
At least half a year to a year of experience writing queries using T-SQL.

What experience are you, as a speaker, bringing to this session?Over a decade of experience with SQL Server, specializing in T-SQL, querying and query tuning, as well as over a decade of writing, teaching and speaking experience.

We have yet another post this morning. This one is from Adam Machanic, who will be presenting A Day of Doing Many Things at Once: Multitasking, Parallelism, and Process Distribution - you can find more about his session here: http://sqlpass.eventpoint.com/topic/details/AD311P.

Is there an audience that would benefit especially from this session?
As database professionals, we must learn to adapt to change. And it is easy to see that our world is changing, rapidly. As recently as five years ago, I/O performance was the name of the game -- almost to the exclusion of everything else. Since then, CPU power has rapidly multiplied, memory capacity has exploded, and solid state devices have become commonplace in the data center. All of which means that I/O is simply not as important as it once was. Data sizes continue to grow, so even as the I/O system delivers data more quickly -- or that data is read directly from the massive in-memory cache -- many queries don't seem to get any faster. The reason? Systems generally fail to consider the new bottleneck: processor resources. This seminar will teach you how to use CPU power to your advantage, making those slow queries scale to meet the demands of your end users.

The seminar is geared toward developers working with large sets of data -- queries that deal with millions or even billions of rows -- but there will also be plenty of material of interest to production DBAs tasked with managing these large SQL Server instances. And even if you don't work with large data today, you eventually will; there is no avoiding the push toward bigger and more interesting databases. (And really, why would you want to avoid it?)

After having attended your seminar, what are two or three things that an attendee will be able to take back to the office and put to use right away?
After attending the seminar you will have a solid understanding of how to read and interact with parallel query plans. You will understand why and how performance is impacted by parallelism and how to control it using both plan shape and server options. If you need to tune large queries on modern hardware (servers with 8 or more cores), you will return to the office with a number of tricks and tools that will help make your query performance both better and more deterministic.

What background should attendees ideally have to be fully prepared for your seminar?It will certainly help if attendees have spent some time studying the basics how to read query plans. The parallel aspects will be covered in depth, but I won't take too much time to explain the underlying non-parallel aspects. A background in computer science fundamentals will help with some of the theory I'll be discussing, but I'll assume that most people in the audience haven't studied CS and will fill in the gaps as needed.

What experience are you, as a speaker, bringing to this session?
I have worked with SQL Server for 11 years, and for the past 8 my career has been focused entirely on SQL Server development. Most of that time has been spent working with large databases, and performance optimization is always at the top of my list. As a consultant I have seen dozens of environments and have been tasked with tuning a huge variety of queries, including many that work with billions of rows. Over time I have developed patterns and tools that have helped me achieve the best possible performance from these monster data consumers, and this set of techniques is what I will share in the seminar.

Is there an audience that would benefit especially from this session?
Sure. The session is especially targeted to everyone who’s making the first steps in the BI world and want to start with the right foot. The workshop is not only a description of how a BI solution can be built, but also aims to give a lot of advices and best practices to avoid common errors and problem, being able to create a BI solution that is both sound and flexible.

After having attended your seminar, what are two or three things that an attendee will be able to take back to the office and put to use right away?
Way more than three. They will be able to design and create a datawarehouse, load and process a cube and produce reports. In addition they will be the first to have access to a new tool that I’m developing that will reduce drastically (by a factor of more than 30) the time needed to handle dimension loading!

What background should attendees ideally have to be fully prepared for your seminar?
Knowledge of T-SQL and SQL Server Engine is enough.

What experience are you, as a speaker, bringing to this session?
I’ll try to put all I’ve learned in the last seven years (since SQL Server 2005 was born) of developing BI solution on the SQL Server platform and all the best practices and the working methodology acquired at service of attendees.
I wouldn’t have missed such workshop if at the beginning of my career I would have a change to attend to it!

Is there an audience that would benefit especially from this session?
In the first hour of the presentation, we cover the basics of SSIS and then quickly jump into more hard core SSIS. If you’re a novice you’ll get a lot out of the session on building the best performing packages with lots of tips and tricks along the way that you won’t get elsewhere.

After having attended your seminar, what are two or three things that an attendee will be able to take back to the office and put to use right away?
The thing that excites me about this presentation is the surprise real world data (no, not AdventureWorks). We’re going to show how to performance tune SSIS, load a data warehouse and solve common business problems with SSIS, like data cleansing.

What background should attendees ideally have to be fully prepared for your seminar?
Even though we show a little about the SSIS basics, we drive into the meat of the presentation fast. So ideally, the attendee should know the basics of the various components in SSIS and what they can do.

What experience are you, as a speaker, bringing to this session?
I’ve been using SSIS since the early beta stages of SQL Server 2005 and DTS prior to that. I’ve implemented it across hundreds of customers and trained thousands of students on how to use it. I’ll bring real world insight to how you can scale and use SSIS.